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Comment by dvcc | Hacker News Reader

That pricing seems insane :o. Even on the lite setup, each conversation would need to have $2 in value, on the standard plan it would need $2.50 in value (I know there is an increase in features but an increase in price per conversation as well?). Although I am not quite sure what a conversation consists of -- it could be a chat between two people over any timespan, in which case it really isn't terrible?

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Hey there, it's Egbert from TalkJS.

Thanks for the feedback! While I disagree that the pricing is insane, you and other commenters here made me realize that maybe we presented it badly.

TalkJS is 10 cents per conversation per month, plus a fixed monthly fee.

I think our mistake has been that we made the fixed monthly fee also include a small number of conversations, which is where all the confusion comes from. It makes it seem like a single conversation costs $2.

The idea behind our pricing is that with a small app you can go live with TalkJS with pretty much the fixed monthly $49 or $249. Once your traffic increases, the price-per-conversation takes over and it's really just 10 cents per conversation, period.

Note that we also offer large bulk discounts for large sites - do get in touch!

I think you need more features to be competitive. In the span of a week by using socket.io I accomplished live chat on our site plus sending the mouse position and changing the current page a user visits on our site. It's not worth using something paid when building it yourself can be so easy.

Hey there, a little update: we changed our pricing section to be more clear that TalkJS isn't $2 per conversation but 10¢. Thanks for your feedback!

Also, I forgot to answer your question. Indeed the 10 cents is per conversation. A conversation can last as long as you want and is only counted once (we charge for a conversation when the first message is sent in it).

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